I think the comparison to ease in leveling is between BC leveling and Azeroth leveling.

In BC, you never had to leave a single zone for quite a while, 2-3 levels sometimes. If you did, it wasn't that far, and it definitely never came to the pain in the ass kind of things that are programmed into Azeroth specifically to waste your time. Having to grab something in Booty Bay and shuttle it off to Stonetalon takes a good half an hour worth of travel. There are tons and tons of absolute time-wasting quests.

Zones aren't balanced to scale up in levels either, you're expected to either grind it out (bad) or spend a single level in as many as 5 zones to be at the appropriate level for a quest. You finish all the quests at a particular skill level in most zones, then a whole new set of quests are available... but they're all red and you have to come back later. The next zone is rarely the zone next to where you're at, since it's 10 levels higher on average, and you're lucky to get a single level out of any one zone's set of quests.

It drags out things to the point of frustration after having gone through outland that I think most people leveling alts now are just realizing. I know that I thought things were okay before, but in the attempts to get my new mage through the content I'm really really frustrated by the large amounts of back and forth between the continents I have to do.

Realistically, all the zones should be re-balanced to give a full level's worth or two of quests, and all the followup quests should follow BC-like progression and be able to be completed while you're still in the zone. The zones should logically follow each other based on proximity, so you're not spending the majority of your game time on a boat or in a flight path.

I felt so much more connected to the BC story and environment, because I spent most of my time actually adventuring in the content. Half the time in the old game, I'm sitting around waiting and wondering why it's really important for me to send something all the way across the planet for 3300xp and some leather boots I can't even use. (oh, and the other major point is that %99 of the quest reward loot in Azeroth is absolutely useless but that's another story...)

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